


Short Meta--River's Dead--Long Live River! Or: You Can Save More Than Once, You Know...

by Tammany



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 09:14:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20207311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is an essay on saving River Song. As in--how could it be done, now that she's supposedly good and dead. Along the way it touches on why some of us think it should be done, and what the character means to us. But mainly it's about the fun of looking at a cherished character and growling, "Who are you dolts to tell us it can't be done? She lives, I tell you--SHE LIVES!!!!" (See mad-scientist-woman laughing manically, as lightning flashes and River rises from the slab, hair in full bush...)





	Short Meta--River's Dead--Long Live River! Or: You Can Save More Than Once, You Know...

For those of us who love her, there’s nothing so wonderful as a bit of River Song. Cheeky, complicated, strong, loving, out-of-sync River, with her cocky attitude and just barely contained grief and longing, all bound up in Alex Kingston’s performance and, yes, her marvelous appearance, makes for a heady draft. Mix her with the Doctor—any Doctor—and it’s high holiday for her fans.

But it was, in theory, ended when the Twelfth Doctor and River were forced down in a crash on Darillium, where the long-identified “last night” occurs. The Husbands of River Song is a much-loved episode, and a graceful one…but, as the Doctor later points out, “All things end—and that’s sad.” Even the tricksy reprieve of a “night” on Darillium being twenty-four years long doesn’t change the hunger for River to be the Doctor’s enduring love and wife…as integral to the Doctor’s legend as the Master. Even if it means changing actresses, there are those of us who yearn for that relationship to abide.

And, yet—we know River dies in the Library. It was our introduction to her. River dies. “All things end—and that’s sad,” but it’s true and inescapable. “There is no happy ever after. That’s just a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is so hard.” That being the case, the crazy, rich love Capaldi and Kingston express in “Husbands,” and the amazing bounty of thinking they have twenty-four years together—a long commitment from the Doctor we know—makes that episode feel like perhaps the best we could hope for…something to jigger with great caution, if at all.

He loves her—he really, really loves her, as much as she loves him, and it’s finally expressed and laid out, and it abides. And he gives her a quarter century of his life exclusively on Darillium. And at last, after a respectable domestic life together, she goes off on an archaeological mission to the Library, where she meets the Tenth Doctor…and she dies, and is saved to a computer bank, and she exists for a long time after (centuries as near as I can tell) as an echo in the machine. And, ultimately, she is convinced to “say goodbye” to the Doctor she’s most associated with, the Eleventh. And that’s it.

But this is Doctor Who. Ends are seldom so pat as that. The Doctor can claim all he likes that all things end, but in Whovian reality, all things that matter—that really, really matter—slip back in again. Rose. The Master/Missy. The Doctor himself.

What loopholes exist to bring River back?

The most obvious one is the same one that brought back thousands of people in the original episode: River has been saved to computer, where she is explicitly declared to be not-dead in the epilogue narrative. There has never been anything explicitly forbidding her being downloaded back into her body—or at least some body—just as the other rescued characters from the episode are downloaded. Indeed, that simple “person as upload/download” premise allows for millions of re-boots of River. As long as her file lives/lived, it’s possible for someone to go back and revive her. And revive her again. And again. And again. And give her a new body. And improve her software. And export her data file around the universe. And incorporate it into the Dalek’s data files. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

That has always been a huge, swinging door—a plot hole big enough to sail an entire solar system through without brushing the edges of the gap. But, eh. Let’s say we aren’t going to take that obvious return seriously. Let’s say we’re going to make her death somehow sacrosanct…

There’s another obvious major loophole, that not only gets her miles more time with the Twelfth Doctor—but wiggle room to go off on her own adventures, and even room to do things like have second lives, third lives, and more.

As River herself points out, regarding the nature of knowing a man with a time machine, you can always go off in the machine, have a nifty adventure, and bring it back without losing a second of “primary” time. Having watched Capaldi’s Twelfth loophole around the limits placed on his official obligations as Missy’s guardian, I find it very hard to believe he and River could not, would not, never-ever-ever buy themselves a few decades by taking a long, round-about jaunt in the Tardis during their twenty-four years “on Darillium.” Maybe even centuries. More than once. With room to plan for happier endings. Or at least for River to plan for happier endings.

I mean, come on: if you could take the Tardis out for a jaunt as long as you like, and come back to the exact same second, and you wanted more than twenty-four years with someone you loved, wouldn’t YOU joyride? A lot?

And—we know River. Do we believe for one second she doesn’t take plenty of private joyrides of her own, for her own adventures, during those twenty-four years? For that matter, as she knows she’s reaching the end of her “first life,” do we really believe she won’t find a way to line up a second life? Send a clone of herself or a robot copy to the Library to die in her stead? Add her own technology to back up the same info in the Library—but better?

River’s not a quitter, and she feels no obligation not to cheat—to cheat people, and to cheat the laws of the universe. On the whole her attitude is that if she can cheat time, that’s time’s problem, not hers. She won’t rewrite on second of her time with the Doctor. But she’s damned likely to plant hooks in those seconds to make sure she can come back, and come back, and come back.

Then there’s the never-resolved issue of how, even when Clara is “gone,” River can manifest as a “ghost.” The easiest answer is that she’s not as limited and ephemeral at the end of her time in the Library as the Doctor thinks she is. She’s a power and an authority by the time of “The Name of the Doctor.”

The Doctor might hate endings. River hates them too—and she’s not a passive fluffy damsel likely to wait to be saved. If you were trapped in a most expansive, powerful, world-controlling computer, with access to all the books ever printed until that time, with the ability to make contact with the rest of the galaxy (as illustrated in several modes in The Name of the Doctor), and you were River Song, would you sit on your thumb and wait for the Doctor to get over his hatred of endings and come rescue you? Or would you figure out a few dozen ways to rescue yourself?

I can think of many, most based on finding ways to provide stored memories with new bodies.

The biggest question is whether the Doctor could bring himself to accept a memory-based River. In spite of the Tenth Doctor’s sense that he saved River when he uploaded her to the computer, his most recent evaluation of identity suggests he’s currently convinced that memory—stored memory—is not the same as the original being. It’s this argument he uses to reject Bill and Nardole. They are a limited, frozen trace of what was once a person.

It makes me itch to ask him how he differentiates between the memories of The Doctor, who dies and gets new bodies over and over again, and the memories of Bill and Nardole, who get new bodies to carry the memories.

But, then—no one has ever been able to force the Doctor to abide by logic when passionate ideals offer a more complicated plot line.

There are more ways, especially using that loophole in the “night on Darillium.” I myself like the idea of River, knowing she’s to die, jaunting off until she can find someone to twin her. Better still if she can twin herself AND return her regeneration ability, lost in reviving the Doctor in Let’s Kill Hitler.

There are ways to copy her and have her on tap from when the Silence and Madame Kovarian were using her to battle the Doctor. There are potential “I’m from another time loop” survivals. As with the Master, there’s just plain, “So what if I was supposed to have died the true death? With the Doctor witnessing my death. I came back anyway.”

What I am getting at is that River doesn’t need to be dead. The series runners and writers can choose to let her be dead…They can choose to ignore spoiler flags they themselves set up to suggest that even the end was never the end. After all, the victory implied in The Husbands of River Song is sufficient. No other character in all of Doctor Who, not even the Tardis herself, is more clearly, understandably the Doctor’s beloved wife than River, and there’s no other character for whom he so decisively sets aside a time. There are few characters honored with the depth of grief the Doctor gives River, with her legacy whispering through The Return of Doctor Mysterio (which is, ultimately, about how much the Doctor misses River, and how soft he is on lovers BECAUSE he misses River), and on into Bill’s tenure, where she appears not only as a photograph—but through her own writing, and through the voice of Nardole, who is clearly assigned the job of guardian by River.

It’s a workable end point. An honorable one. It makes sense of even the Doctor’s failure to ever rescue her from the Library: whether he develops a very non-Doctorish aversion to memory-based reincarnation as part of his own trauma over River’s death, or whether River’s death was never really seen as averted by him in the first place, we’re given a Doctor who can’t and won’t revive her from the memory banks who is consistent with a Doctor who can’t accept Bill and Nardole’s survival, either.

But I don’t think letting her fade and be forgotten is much like the show itself, or much like the Doctor, or much like River herself. With so many ways to prepare to avert death, undo death, defeat death, and so much time built into both their lives to plan ahead—

I think River needs to come back. Whether its to Jodi Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor, or to any of the prior Doctors, or any future Doctor, it should happen. So, too, should additional adventures with Capaldi’s Doctor—life ripped from the teeth of death as they use the Tardis to “make time. Just a little time.” How doesn’t matter. What matters is that there’s no reason by Whovian logic that it should not happen.


End file.
